The Sound and the Fury: List 3: April Sixth, 1928

“Cotton is a speculator’s crop. They fill the farmer full of hot air and get him to raise a big crop for them to whipsaw on the market, to trim the suckers with. Do you think the farmer gets anything out of it except a red neck and a hump in his back? You think the man that sweats to put it into the ground gets a red cent more than a bare living,” I says.

They were all in town for the show, coming in in droves to give their money to something that brought nothing to the town and wouldn’t leave anything except what those grafters in the Mayor’s office will split among themselves...

Rent him out to a sideshow; there must be folks somewhere that would pay a dime to see him, then she cried more and kept saying my poor afflicted baby and I says yes he’ll be quite a help to you when he gets his growth not being more than one and a half times as high as me now and she says she’d be dead soon and then we’d all be better off and so I says all right, all right, have it your way.

“There, there,” Uncle Maury says, patting her hand, talking around his mouth. “It’s better so. Let him be unaware of bereavement until he has to.”

But I know that people cannot flout God’s laws with impunity.

What do doctors know? They make their livings advising people to do whatever they are not doing at the time, which is the extent of anyone’s knowledge of the degenerate ape.

I gwine spread me a pallet right acrost de hall, so you wont need to git up in de night.

Well, I got to thinking about that and watching them throwing dirt into it, slapping it on anyway like they were making mortar or something or building a fence, and I began to feel sort of funny and so I decided to walk around a while.

“I’m sorry about that, Jason.”
“I bet you are,” I says. “You'll talk mighty meek now. But you needn’t have come back. There’s not anything left. Ask Uncle Maury, if you dont believe me.”

She just stood there looking at me, shaking like an ague-fit, her hands clenched and kind of jerking.

“I know they have Mother’s indorsement on them,” she says. “But I want to see the bank statement. I want to see myself where those checks go.”

“If you think you have any right to pry into her private affairs I’ll tell her you believe those checks are being misappropriated and you want an audit because you dont trust her.”

Well, I could have said it wasn’t much chance of anybody hurting Quentin much, but like I say I dont expect much but I do want to eat and sleep without a couple of women squabbling and crying in the house.

“What can I do,” she says. “You have all of you flouted me. Always.”

You will be glad to learn that I am now in a position to avail myself of an opportunity regarding which, for reasons which I shall make obvious to you, I shall not go into details until I have an opportunity to divulge it to you in a more secure manner.

My business experience has taught me to be chary of committing anything of a confidential nature to any more concrete medium than speech, and my extreme precaution in this instance should give you some inkling of its value.

...I have just completed a most exhaustive examination of all its phases, and I feel no hesitancy in telling you that it is that sort of golden chance that comes but once in a lifetime, and I now see clearly before me that goal toward which I have long and unflaggingly striven...

As it so happens, I am not quite in a position to avail myself of this opportunity to the uttermost which it warrants, but rather than go out of the family to do so, I am today drawing upon your Mother’s bank for the small sum necessary to complement my own initial investment, for which I herewith enclose, as a matter of formality, my note of hand at eight percent, per annum.

For naturally I shall employ this sum as though it were my own and so permit your Mother to avail herself of this opportunity which my exhaustive investigation has shown to be a bonanza—if you will permit the vulgarism—of the first water and purest ray serene.

And knowing your Mother’s delicate health and that timorousness which such delicately nurtured Southern ladies would naturally feel regarding matters of business, and their charming proneness to divulge unwittingly such matters in conversation, I would suggest that you do not mention it to her at all.

It might be better to simply restore this sum to the bank at some future date, say, in a lump sum with the other small sums for which I am indebted to her, and say nothing about it at all. It is our duty to shield her from the crass material world as much as possible.

“Are you sure the business is sound? It seems strange to me that a solvent business cannot pay its employees promptly.”

I know he doesn’t take you into his confidence to the extent that your investment in the business should warrant.

I reckon he thinks they’d get him on the usury law if he netted more than eight percent.

It’s because a man never gets anywhere if fact and his ledgers dont square.

Haggling over a twenty cent hame string to save fifteen cents, so they can give it to a bunch of Yankees that come in and pay maybe ten dollars for the privilege.

Sometimes I think what’s the use of anything. With the precedent I’ve been set I must be crazy to keep on.

Yet we spend money and spend money on roads and dam if it isn’t like trying to drive over a sheet of corrugated iron roofing.

Shirking and stealing and giving you a little more lip and a little more lip until some day you have to lay them out with a scantling or something.

The night they turned on the new lights around the courthouse it waked them up and they were flying around and blundering into the lights all night long.

She couldn’t bear for any of you to do anything she couldn’t. It was vanity in her, vanity and false pride.

When they began to sell the land to send Quentin to Harvard I told your father that he must make an equal provision for you.

Then when Herbert offered to take you into the bank I said, Jason is provided for now, and when all the expense began to pile up and I was forced to sell our furniture and the rest of the pasture, I wrote her at once because I said she will realise that she and Quentin have had their share and part of Jason’s too and that it depends on her now to compensate him.

I dont reckon he even knew what he had been trying to do, or why Mr Burgess knocked him out with the fence picket. And if they’d just sent him on to Jackson while he was under the ether, he’d never have known the difference.

I just want an even chance to get my money back. And once I’ve done that they can bring all Beale street and all bedlam in here and two of them can sleep in my bed and another one can have my place at the table too.